The Futurist

The visionary polymath NERI OXMAN is creating solutions “to problems that may not yet exist.”

- Molly Langmuir

The designer and architect Neri Oxman carefully makes her way up the steps to the stage of MIT’s Kresge Auditorium. It’s late February, and Oxman, a tenured professor at the school, is nearly seven months pregnant. She wears a black top, black velvet pants, and high black patent leather stilettos, with her wildly curly hair loosely pulled up, as it often is, to form a halo around her head. Onstage she gives the audience, assembled for an event celebrating the university’s new Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, a beatific smile. “It has become increasingly challenging to differentiate between the man-made and the nature grown,” she says, her hands loosely cupped around her belly. “In my [research] group, we believe in the future; we will not build our products and our architecture, but rather we will grow them.”

Since 2010, Oxman has directed the Mediated Matter group at MIT’s Media Lab, which is renowned for producing radically interdisciplinary work, but even in that context, her speciality is so novel she had to come up with a new term for it (she calls it material ecology). Technically, Oxman utilizes computational design and elements of architecture, 3-D printing, materials science, engineering, and synthetic biology to develop solutions “to problems that may not yet exist,” as she often puts it. What this means in practice is that she has produced everything from a silk pavilion—a suspended dome of silk fibers spun by a robotic arm, completed by 6,500 live silkworms—to a design concept for a wearable digestive system incorporating photosynthetic bacteria that convert solar energy into sugar, which could be utilized, she once said, on Jupiter’s moons. Almost all her work contains a pristine, fractal beauty generally found only in nature. Oxman is often, by the way, compared to Leonardo da Vinci. She also has an uncanny resemblance to a movie star.